An area I visit regular is OWA 2007 and the Enterprise Vault add-in for it. One thing that I’ve looked at recently is “delays” in the retrieval process. Here is the outcome of the testing that I did recently on some quite old VMWare machines :

The first thing that we know causes a slow down is when the IIS App pool has to be started. It simply takes a little time to start these processes up. This is largely out of our control, and when these do need to be started up we see the following :

You see the basket starts restoring the item when the IIS App pools have started up. We then check every 2 seconds to see if we can open the item from the deleted items folder, and when we can, we’re in.

There is another web.config setting to control the number of iterations and the time between :